All posts by Chessurfer

The most important chess tournament of the year has started! The Candidates tournament is an eight player double round-robin event played over fourteen rounds. It will be held in the Russian city of Khanty Mansiysk from March 13-31. The winner will challenge Magnus Carlsen in the world Championship that is to take place in November 2014. Where? That is still open, because at the moment of writing, there was not a serious bidder for the title match. Why bidding for an event if you do not know who is playing? The new deadline set by FIDE is 30. April.

In this short Twitter guide to the Candidates, I will take a look at the Twitter accounts of the players.

Not all Candidates have a Twitter account. Of course, former world champion Vishy Anand has an account: @Vishy64theking. Do not expect too much action on his account during the event. His 25.600 followers will not get many updates, I’m afraid. Sergey Karjakin has an account, which is easy to remember @SergeyKaryakin. He has 5.700 follower. I don’t think he will post a lot during the event, so it might be interesting to follow the account of his girlfriend Galiya Kamalova @GaliyaChess. She posts mostly in Russian, but she also shows lots of pictures from the venue and lovely “behind the scenes” shots.

What a great excuse to post a picture of Galiya (and your blogger)! This one was taken in 2012 in Moscow. We attended a Man vs. Machine Match.

You will find Peter Svider on Twitter under this name: @polborta, an account with 6.300 follower. Expect a lot of tweets that have nothing to do with chess! The clear favorite for many chess experts is Levon Aronian, and you can find him on Twitter as well: @LevAronian. Interesting: in his profile he writes: “chess gangsta”. The Armenian ace has around 12.000 follower.

Shakhriyar Mamedyarov has a Twitter account @ShahriyarMamedy, with only 825 folower. He does does tweet very often unfortunately. I love tweets like : “In Madrid very good weather,very good people, very good sity, but only one problem,I have not good mood:( because I am ill.”

Dmitry Andreikin does not have a Twitter account himself, but alternatively you could add @Svetlana_Chess, Dmitry’s wife, for an occasional tweet in Russian or a family picture.

Veselin Topalov, and Vladimir Kramnik do not have official Twitter accounts. Correct me if I am wrong!